Every Bolt and Volt owner I’ve met really liked the cars.

Yeah, roughly the cost of a leaf, better range, and not ugly. They were close to the perfect commuter cars (I very nearly went with the Volt, but went with a model 3 in 2018 instead.).

I test drove a second gen Volt when we were looking for a second car, Wife preferred an SUV but I was in love with the Volt. Wildly cool car that is shockingly fun to drive.

I rented one. My only concern is that it was made by GM, and I've had uniformly negative experiences with them in recent years. It made me think they might be moving in a reasonable direction after all, but they proved that thought wrong in the last month or two. Oh well.

Too bad they couldn't sell the plant + Bolt designs to some other company, like when The Expanse moved to Amazon.

I think we are seeing the effects of a supply chain strain around battery production.

GM is killing the bolt in favor of trucks. I'm sure they'd still want the bolt but likely trucks are more lucrative and batteries hard to come by.

My guess is 10 years before that battery crunch eases up.

I think there is a hint of strategy here. Bolt was on last-gen tech for GM and killing it made sense to consolidate to the current-gen "Ultium" platform. There's just a lot of timing questions about GM not announcing a proper Bolt successor before killing it.

Also, favoring trucks is quite probably GM worried about Ford's massive US truck fan base and hoping they can outpace Ford's supply chain bootstrapping issues with Ultium, which did have something of a head start (and multiple proven predecessor generations). (It's interesting to compare Ford's stop gap F-150 Lightning/Mach-E on an already announced dead platform and Ford moving to VW's relatively more proven MEB platform as an attempted short-cut around supply chain issues by leveraging VW logistics.)

But yeah, I wish GM would finally announce the remaining "unknown" Ultium models and hope that at least one properly fills the hole left behind by the Bolt.

The thing about trucks is that even if their battery costs are 60% more, they will price the Truck roughly 200% more. Any Ev truck will start in the $60k Range and top $100k. It's a sad misuse of resources that works better for investors.

Too early to tell (as it isn't yet available), but the Chevrolet Equinox EV should basically be a Bolt EUV with a (subjectively) better looking face and more name recognition. Similar range/price.

Bolt was a placeholder until the unified EV platform (Ultium) was ready to go. They're start to launch Ultium cars this year.